Chapter Text
The center of the North Corel Mako Refinery was a closed, cylindrical building, and only Shinra workers with the highest levels of security clearance could go there.
Where Barret worked was a large ring connected to the main tower by four walkways, and extending downwards at least a hundred feet on the walls of the circular pit mine. Various automated control systems, Shinra administrative offices, company dorms, testing and quality control labs, and experimental projects were housed here.
Late-afternoon crimson sunlight angled in from a small row of windows high on the inner wall, and sparkled off something above. Stretching to relieve some of the tension in his neck at the end of a long day, Barret happened to look up. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have seen it.
There was a kind of small bump on one of the pipes that hung from the ceiling, reachable from the maintenance workers’ catwalk fifteen feet above.
If Barret knew anything, it was that those pipes didn’t carry water – they were electrical, housing wires. Following the offending pipe with his eyes, he could see it disappeared into a control box on the outer wall. So it was pretty weird to see gunk there – like the kind of buildup you got when a leaking water pipe started to rust.
He pondered, for a minute, whether he should go up there to look at it. It could probably wait until tomorrow – except that tomorrow was Saturday. Still, it could probably wait until Monday.
But—
“Alright,” Barret said aloud.
After all, it had been his proposal for the Mako plant to come to North Corel in the first place. Even though almost everyone in town had agreed, he still felt a sense of responsibility for it. That’s why he’d personally applied for a position here as Safety Officer, and Shinra had been so short of engineering staff they’d accepted his application and put him through a two week training course.
So now he prowled the outer circle of the plant, officially reading the meters, and unofficially looking for shorts in the electrical wiring and other evidence – in the form of panicked Shinra employees – that something was amiss with the central tower.
As Barret started to look around for a way up to the catwalk – he’d seen electricians up there only a few hours ago, their arms sore from working above their heads all day – a young-looking Shinra soldier came over to hurry him along out of the building.
“Shift’s over, buddy.”
“Just one more thing to do, buddy, then I’ll be outta your hair.”
“Listen—”
“No YOU listen, you guys hired me to do a job, so why don’t you just let me do it?”
The soldier hesitated – clearly he hadn’t expected any resistance – and Barret got ready to dig in his heels, and argue a little until he got what he wanted. But before he could—
“Let him go up,” another voice called. Barret and the cadet looked over to the speaker.
The man was light-skinned, with sharp grey eyes and wavy, shoulder-length brown hair. He was dressed in a too-big, wrinkled blue suit and Barret was positive he had never seen him before... which was odd, because he’d been introduced to all the big Shinra bosses when he’d first been hired.
The man seemed to be in his mid-30s, too young to be very senior on an org chart, but at least he had enough seniority that the soldier hesitated.
“Sir…”
“What’s your name, cadet?”
“Yul, sir.”
“You can go home, Yul. I’ll keep an eye on things here.”
“Yes, sir!”
Barret realized belatedly that the soldier had most likely been assigned to babysit him and the other local contractors, and make sure they didn’t get up to any unsupervised trouble. He’d probably just wanted to clock out for the weekend.
In fact Barret himself had been having second thoughts – was it really so important that he look at the pipe right now, or was he just trying to assuage his own anxiety? – but what was done was done.
“Appreciate your help, man,” he said, nodding to the man in the suit. “It'll just take a minute.”
“Oh, it’s no problem,” the man said. “As you said – why hire safety inspectors if we don’t let them do what we hired them for?”
“Damn right.”
‘Safety inspector’ was a generous term for what Barret did, anyone who’d finished the training course could have done it. But the pay was alright, and he had plans to learn enough wiring to advance to an electrician’s job, as soon as he’d saved up enough for the certification test. Barret had always been pretty good at school. Nodding to the man, he found his way up to the catwalk.
The pipe definitely had some kind of bump on it, indicating a Mako buildup. The flakes came off like rust as he rubbed, gently, with a glove on. It had a greenish copper color, a faint sparkle, and felt slightly gritty, like wet sand.
Where was the leak coming from? Looking around, Barret could only see an air vent, hidden in the gloom another ten feet up. Maybe some condensation drip? He couldn’t get up there without a ladder and he thought he could sense the impatience of the suited man below him, though when he glanced down he seemed unconcerned, thumbs flying swiftly across a company PHS.
As if he sensed Barret’s gaze, he glanced upward with a quizzical look, snapping the clam-shell phone shut.
“Find what you’re looking for?” He called out.
“Not yet… you gotta ladder down there?” Barret called back.
“I can ask… though I believe the foreman already left for the day… and locked all the tools in the equipment box, unfortunately.”
Barret thought about it. The residue, whatever it was, seemed to have built up slowly. If he hadn’t been doing fiddly work all day, and needed to stretch just as the last rays of sunlight came in through the windows at just the right angle, he probably wouldn’t have noticed it himself.
“It can wait until Monday,” he allowed.
****
Everyone on the Planet understood that Mako was dangerous – both the raw, untreated Mako that Shinra pumped to the surface, and the refined Mako Shinra used to power the electric grid.
But all things in life were a trade-off, in Barret's opinion. It wasn't like coal was perfect either.
Barret took his job very seriously, there would not be a single leak at the factory on his watch! He kept a close eye on the meters, and performed daily calculations to make sure the overall volumes added up.
If they didn’t, it indicated that somewhere in the system, some untreated Mako was getting out. Then it was his job to hunt down the source of the trouble, if it happened to be in his area, or to flag the case for Shinra’s more senior engineers to investigate if it was somewhere he couldn’t go.
He had a rough idea of how the central reactor worked – at least well enough to understand the safety indicators.
First, huge amounts of water, diverted from the North Corel river, were pumped underground to where the Lifestream ran deep below the surface. Sometimes pressurized water jets forced apart the rock and stone at the bottom of the circular mine Shinra had dug out, until the pump could reach the underground reservoir where the LIfestream was thickest.
In a place like Mideel, the Lifestream ran close to the surface, but was shallow and slow-moving. Here the Lifestream was rumored to run swiftly and deeply, possibly running under the entire North Corel valley.
What came back to the surface was a sludgy mix of water, heavy metals, the chemicals they used for drilling, and Mako that needed to be purified. This happened essentially by boiling it. Because water and Mako had different boiling points, a hot steam mixture of Mako-and-water could be separated by being run through a series of condensers.
At each condenser, some of the Mako would filter out, leaving mainly water vapor to travel upwards to the next level of condenser. At the very end of this process, the water-and-Mako mix was sent back down to the bottom for another round of boiling and filtering. Only after this had been done three or four times was the remaining water vapor considered safe to vent to the air. This was economical as well, since the first pass was only about 63% efficient. Unfortunately, Mako had a very similar boiling point to water, and was therefore difficult to separate out.
There were various other processes as well, for removing other chemical impurities from the condensed liquid Mako, but those took place in other chambers on the lowest levels of the rig, requiring high security clearance and special protective gear to access.
At the last stage of the process, the condensed Mako traveled on to a different facility via an underground pipeline, to be converted into electricity; or was packed into sealed drums for transport on the train that ran south to the Golden Saucer. Then, after a few more filtration steps to remove the mining chemicals and heavy minerals, the remaining hot water was shunted back into the river.
It was the extreme concentration of Mako after the filtering process that made it dangerous to work with – Mako in its natural state in the Lifestream, Shinra literature claimed, was wholly natural and diluted, and therefore no more dangerous than a banana or a granite countertop.
Similarly, the mix of heavy metals and chemicals that filtered out of the process was also considered extremely safe, after appropriate treatment. In fact, Shinra had found all kinds of uses for this byproduct. It was rumored to make plants grow, and used as a fertilizer on gardens. On the other side of the mountains in Nibelheim, it was used to melt the snow on the roads in the winter.
***
Monday morning, bright and early. Barret got into the equipment box just after the maintenance guys, and liberated his ladder.
Running a hand along the vent on the ceiling, he felt nothing, but then his gloves were waterproof. He didn’t see any moisture on the glove, though. That might mean it wasn’t a leak from the air duct onto the pipe, but moisture condensing out of the air.
Barret frowned. Something didn’t add up. The whole Mako refinement process was sealed from beginning to end, none of it should have ended up in the air. Besides that, the buildup he’d noticed on Friday had been cleaned over the weekend by the maintenance guys, so there was no longer any evidence it had been there. Barret almost thought he’d imagined it, except—
“Did you find what you were looking for?” It was the man from Friday. Barret weighed his options. He was half tempted to forget about it, but if something happened down the line he’d never forgive himself.
He clambered down the ladder, then instructed a gripper robot to take it back to the storage box. By the time he’d reached the floor, the robot had wheeled around the curved catwalk and out of sight.
“You have any plans I’m allowed to look at?” he asked. He didn’t expect much, security was tight around here. But if he could just figure out where that air vent went…
“Allowed, not exactly...” the man said. “But…”
“But there’s somethin’ you can show me?” Barret asked, on a hunch.
The man seemed to weigh his options. “How important is this?” he asked, after a minute. “Because I might be in a tough spot with my bosses if they found out I helped you.”
“...Medium important,” Barret said, after a pause of his own. “Could be nothing, could be something. Won’t know until I see those plans.”
“...I’ll do it because you seem like a good guy,” the man decided. “With a trustworthy aura.” Barret raised an eyebrow, that sounded like bullshit to him.
But hey, if it got him what he wanted… anyone willing to sneak around behind the backs of the bosses was all right in his book.
“Deal,” he said.
“I’m Clayton,” the man said, extending his hand. “The bosses sent me out here to make sure you civilian guys have what you need.”
“Barret,” Barret said, returning the handshake. Clayton's small hand was dwarfed in his, and soft like he'd expected from a bureaucrat. “And thanks man, I appreciate it.”
****
Pouring over the plans that night, Barret started to get a bad feeling.
They weren’t complete – just the ventilation system. The exact method by which Shinra cooked the Lifestream into Mako was a trade secret, though the basics were easy enough for anyone to understand.
But Barret couldn't understand how any Mako could have gotten in to the building.
The vent he'd looked at was part of the central air system for the offices in the ring. A completely separate air system brought in air to the reboilers sitting on the spokes of the central tower, where a small amount of Mako was used to heat water in a closed loop. That pressurized hot water was then used to heat the Mako-water-chemical sludge on the bottom level of the tower until it turned into steam, before returning to the reboilers to be heated again in a closed loop.
None of these systems had anything to do with each other, and all the systems that touched the Mako directly were completely closed, not just to each other, but to the outside air as well, until all the filtration was finished. Maybe there was another leak in some hidden system in the ceiling…
“Studying the electrical code again?”
“Nah, just reading for work.” The diagrams he was looking at were nothing like electrical diagrams, but Barret knew that to Myrna, all technical drawings looked the same.
“You work too much,” his wife told him, “It’s only Monday,” but she knew better than to take the plans from him. Myrna respected his attention, and he respected hers. However, she did move to where he could see her, posed seductively in a cotton nightdress with sunflowers on it.
“Someone’s gotta keep these Shinra guys honest,” Barret told her. “And since none of the other Corel guys can read, it's on me.”
“Now you know that’s not true,” Myrna said. “Plenty of people in this town can read.” And saying that, she arched an eyebrow to the stack of books in the corner – Eleanor’s leftovers, that she’d loaned to Myrna before they were due back to the library in Cosmo Canyon.
“I know, I’m just playing,” Barret said. “But that is what the Shinra guys think about us... Every time I read a meter it's like I'm a dog performing a trick, we’re a joke to them!”
“Hmmm.”
Education in North Corel wasn’t on the level of education in Midgar or the other big cities, but there were at least a few locals here who were interested, and pitched in their salaries for a little schoolhouse that kept the kids occupied for a few hours each day. Besides which, they were close to a railway that ran along the mountains, and scholars from Cosmo Canyon sometimes passed through on their way to another ecological settlement on the northern coast. Eleanor made a habit of talking to those guys, and begging an extra copy of whatever books they could spare for the schoolhouse. Eventually she’d talked her way into the personal PHS number of the head librarian down in Cosmo Canyon, and now they had a system worked out.
“I think I saw something about Mako on Eleanor’s list,” Myrna told Barret. “Want me to ask her to get it?”
“Won’t do no good... by the time it gets here either I'll figure it out, or the guys in suits will get sick of seein’ my face," Barret said, "And fire me for bein’ too much of a pain in the ass.”
Myrna just arched an eyebrow at him, knowing he didn’t really mean it.
“In that case I think I’ll order it just in case you change your mind,” she said.
On the surface, Myrna and Elenor were completely different – Myrna, the daughter of a local firebrand politician, was herself fairly subdued, though she held strong opinions that you’d learn in due time if you truly got to know her. Eleanor, on the other hand, was outspoken and somewhat impulsive. Myrna gave the impression of a deep thinker, someone who weighed her words carefully, while Eleanor seemed to say whatever popped into her head.
But the best friends were, under the surface, a lot more similar than they appeared. For one, they both couldn’t stand idly by in the face of injustice – Myrna always ready to offer grounded advice and a sympathetic ear, and Eleanor ready to confront the wrong doers.
And his wife had never been afraid to him what was on her mind, which was why, in Barret's opinion, she was the most perfect person on the entire Planet.
Barret came over, and kissed the top of her head – which fit perfectly under his chin, as Myrna's arms came up to wrap around his waist. Her dress was soft and worn, and he could feel the heat of her body through it.
“I really love you… you know that?” he said.
“I do,” Myrna said, “but the reminder never hurts.”
****
For the next month, Barret didn’t see any more evidence of leaks at the plant. All the numbers on the gauges he read every day looked good, and none of the Shinra lab techs seemed concerned.
Barret had almost put it out of his head, except:
1) His neighbor Daphne, who kept three rescue dogs, had two go crazy and had to put them down.
2) The kids in North Corel were learning to walk about three months later than usual. According to the town doctor their balance was off.
3) Some of the older villagers, the ones who lived near the river and still did their washing there - enjoying the outside air, and too old to learn to use the new washing machines - were reporting bad arthritis, headaches and nausea, and numbness in their fingertips.
4) Mrs. Cleese, a thirty-five year-old widow and the picture of good health, was sitting one day on the edge of her antique tub – that she would hand-fill with buckets of water from the North Corel river, warmed in pots over her little coal stove – when she’d slipped and fallen in, and twisted a muscle on her back that was taking much too long to heal.
The local doctor had prescribed bed rest followed by a physical therapy regime that she was declining to follow. Therefore, Myrna had been called in to smooth things out and Barret had followed along behind to satisfy his own curiosity. The doctor for their town saw patients on the first floor of his house, which was divided into a little waiting area up front, and a small examination room in the back. Barret and Myrna both took seats in the waiting area, where the doctor met them with coffee and biscuits.
According to Doctor Romero, Mrs. Cleese's bones had gotten denser, and this was putting an unusual amount of stress on her muscles.
“Could it be Mako?” Myrna asked, with an innocent expression. Because of her calm demeanor, she could sometimes ask questions that others would interpret as having political implications – like she was subtly looking to start trouble with Shinra, the town’s largest (and only) employer.
But the doctor took her question as neutral.
“Mako does increase bone density…” he said, thoughtfully. “I mean, that’s why they use it in the SOLDIER program, no? Bones are a sink for all kinds of radiation, it tends to collect there. If you aren’t aware of it and don’t train the muscles enough, it can cause some problems.”
“Are you saying Ms. Cleese doesn’t train her muscles enough???” Barret asked, incredulous. It was a ridiculous suggestion, on the face of it – everyone in town could see her carrying her buckets of water to and from the river every day. The three of them all paused for a moment in the doctor’s little parlor room, coffee cups in hand, and considered that possibility.
“It does seem odd,” Myrna said diplomatically.
“It is odd,” Doctor Romero admitted, “but if you have any sense of self preservation,” – and here he looked sidelong at Barret and Myrna, as if to comment on the likelihood of that – “You’ll leave it alone, Barret Wallace. Shinra’s been a good thing for the town.”
It was the wrong thing to say to her husband, Myrna knew. Now Barret would be twice as stubborn. She put a hand over his.
“What’s your recommendation, then?” she asked the doctor, while her husband glowered by her side with the tiny ceramic coffee cup clenched his other big hand. She knew he well enough to know he was holding back what he thought of this only because this was her errand, not his.
“I gave her a physical therapy routine to follow,” the doctor told Myrna, “but she’s stuck in her ways. Make sure she follows it, okay?”
“Of course,” Myrna said.
****
“He’s full of it,” Barret said, as soon as they got back home. “Don’t ask questions, Shinra’s too important – bah! That’s exactly why we need to be asking questions!”
“He only knows what he knows, and Shinra sponsored his med school,” Myrna reminded him. “He was probably being honest, as far as that went.”
“Everyone knows that messin’ around with the boiled Mako is dangerous, but this is the first I’m hearin’ about the natural Mako bein’ dangerous, too,” Barret grumbled. “Funny how Shinra conveniently left that part outta their sales pitch.”
“Maybe it depends on the levels?” Myrna asked. “I wish we could ask someone.”
“Maybe it’s in one of your books,” Barret said, “Or maybe…” He paused, and a pained look fled swiftly across his face.
“I’ll ask Eleanor to ask Dyne,” Myrna said, diplomatically.
The rift between Barret and Dyne, that had started ever since Barret had supported the Mako plant coming to North Corel, and Dyne had opposed it, was painful for both of them. Before the rift, Barret and Dyne had been close.
The split was especially painful for Barret, however, because Eleanor and Dyne had been two of the only people to support Barret and Myrna’s marriage last year. Myrna’s father, and all his cronies, had been against Barret as an option for her and he still accepted Barret as his daughter's husband only grudgingly after they’d been together for more than four years.
Possibly he’d never see what Myrna saw: that Barret was fiercely protective of her and the town; strongly loyal and intelligent; and not afraid to speak his mind.
“Kids and dogs – it ain’t right,” he said.
****
In the end, Eleanor was happy to order as many books about Mako as she could get her hands on, gushing to Myrna that there were some that even her husband hadn’t read yet.
And while Dyne didn’t know anything, specifically, that could help, he did unbend a little at the word that Barret, too, was starting to be skeptical of Shinra.
That news was enough to finally break the ice between the two old friends, and the couple invited Barret and Myrna over for dinner, where they had a wonderful meal of boiled lamb with red wine - and a salad of the late-summer tomatoes and cucumbers Myrna was growing in a little plot of land behind their house.
Good food and old friends. They all sat around a big table in Dyne and Eleanor's backyard, and toasted to friendship - and to the good news that Eleanor and Dyne were expecting a child next year, in the early spring.
“It’s so funny, if you think about it,” Myrna told Barret on the walk home, as the two of them meandered down their town’s main - and only - street. “The way Dyne talks about the Lifestream, it sounds so mystical? Like a great… thing, that all of us are part of.”
“Yeah,” Barret said, holding out a hand to steady her - and himself. They’d both had a lot to drink, and so had Eleanor and Dyne - one last big blowout before Eleanor started cutting back for her pregnancy.
“It’s so funny,” Myrna said again, “that we’re powering our new electric stove with the souls of dead people.”
“We used to power our old stove with dead animals and trees,” Barret pointed out. “Cause coal comes from that…”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Flush with food and alcohol, Barret felt happy but also apprehensive.
After all, with Barret’s job at the plant pulling in a steady income, and plenty of work available in town for Myrna, they’d decided recently that it was time that they, too, had a child. Eleanor would be first but Myrna would soon be next, if they were lucky - so the kids could grow up together.
Kids and dogs – but hopefully not their kids or their dogs.
*****
Thinking about Dyne and Eleanor’s kid on the way - and hopefully his and Myrna's too - Barret was vigilant at work, but nothing happened for the next month and a half. When the books came in, he pounced.
“You know, in these books on Planetology,” he told Myrna late one night after work, as they were lying in bed together with only the desk light on - the cheap electricity being another benefit to having the Mako plant here - “they talk about people living together close to the Lifestream for thousands of years, right? It’s hard to see how it could be dangerous just to live next to it. Don't you have to dunk people in mako tanks to make them into SOLDIERS? Or inject them with glowing liquids or something?”
“I don’t know if what they show on TV is accurate,” Myrna said dryly. “But I think so… maybe the ancient people knew more about it?”
“Maybe…”
“You can’t compare ordinary people to the people from back then, anyway,” Myrna said. “They had magic powers.”
“You give me grief for TV,” Barret grumbled playfully, poking her side, “then go quoting from fantasy novels. Make up yer mind!”
“The ancient people are real,” Myrna defended. “There’s way too many books about them for them to be made up...”
“Yeah but that don’t mean the stories aren't bullshit - it ain't like anyone really knows what happened that long ago,” Barret said.
“ ...maybe some of them are exaggerated. Anyway, I think the ancient people had a way to detect the Lifestream, you know, in a natural way? I’ve been reading about it, there are modern recreations of their devices. Maybe you could make one,” and she passed the book she was reading to Barret, showing a complicated electrical gadget that looked a bit like a radar gun.
Barret studied it.
“If they leave the storage box open at work,” he allowed. “So I can get the parts. Then…
“Then yeah, I think I could rig somethin’ like this up.”
*****
He had to be sneaky to get the parts for the radar gun offsite, but even though Shinra had high security in some areas, where the local contractors worked was never as closely guarded as it should have been. There was a bit of a tradition among the locals, in fact, dating back from coal mining days, to let the apprentice workers take a bit away here and there.
Since the first time he’d noticed something, there had been no other signs at work – though more and more pets in town were getting aggressive, and needing to be put down. Even some of the wild animals around town had been aggressive, recently. And Myrna, working with Mrs. Cleese on her physical therapy, had pointed out odd signs and sores - what looked like skin lesions.
But Barret was still surprised when he finally brought his handmade Mako detector into work, and pointed it at the air vent.
The science behind Mako was still very new, and a lot of it was a trade secret. There weren’t really any commonly agreed upon boundaries, between what was safe and what wasn’t.
But the levels were FAR above anything he’d read in the books Myra had brought up - which, when they weren’t mystical, mostly talked about what to do if there was Mako in the groundwater seeping into your basement.
In fact, the levels were about 100 times higher than the levels discussed in those books.
At this point, Barret simply blanked. He'd been focused on finding hard, numerical evidence that the troubles in town were linked to the Shinra Mako plant, but now that he had it, what could he do with it?
Shinra was already here, and people were happy with the town’s new prosperity. New businesses were going up all the time, to sell things to the soldiers and scientists who ventured out of their company dorms, and into town on the weekends.
In fact, Barret had been the one to argue that Shinra coming here would be a good thing for the town. How could he suddenly change his mind? What if he was wrong?
It was in this state of panic that he was caught, red-handed, taking measurements outside the restricted areas after everyone else had gone home.
“Barret!” It was Clayton, the soft-handed bureaucrat who’d first helped him all those months ago.
“Er…”
“I’m so glad I found...no, we shouldn’t talk about this here. Meet at the bar in town in an hour?”
Barret, bewildered, could only nod.
He’d expected to lose his job over this, and maybe have to skip town entirely. This was far outside of what he’d imagined.
*****
Clayton explained the scheme to Barret in a quiet corner of the local bar – after first checking, with some paranoia, to see if anyone from Shinra was listening to their conversation.
“Something is very wrong with the plant,” he told Barret. “Something they aren’t telling us. I’ve been collecting evidence for months. Will you help me? But it must be a complete secret, until we’re ready to come clean with the whole truth.”
“You’re a whistle blower?” Barret asked. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for one.”
“I plan to be,” Clayton said modestly. “But Shinra watches me too closely, and the locals don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s wrong. I’ve been looking for a partner in crime.”
“So that day you saw me lookin' at the pipe…”
“Yes, I’ve had my eye on you since then,” he said, “But I had to be sure. Will you help me?”
Barret hardly needed to think about it.
“Deal,” he said, and shook that soft hand - the hand of a pencil-pusher - for the second time.
****
The rest of the fall and winter passed in a blur. Eleanor caught on to what Barret was going, and wanted in, but Dyne put his foot down - he didn't want his pregnant wife anywhere near the possibly contaminated samples. They compromised, and she merely passed on notes to townsfolk, using the school as a cover, and letting them know where to drop their blood and soil samples.
Dyne told her, and Barret, that what they were doing was a waste of time - that there was no reasoning with Shinra. But he'd always been a bit cynical, and Barret refused to give up without even trying.
For six months, he worked like crazy. If the animals went crazy, he kept their blood samples. If someone’s kid was sick, he tested the soil in their garden. At work, he brought eye-stoppers and took condensation samples off the pipes. He kept most of what he found in an old abandoned mine shaft, that even most of the locals wouldn't know how to access. He didn't want any of the samples around the house, around Myrna.
Still, after a tense discussion the two of them agreed to hold off on trying for a kid, until after the project was over and the house was safe again.
He never opened anything that wasn’t already open at work - there was a clean way to produce this power, Barret was sure. If all the pipes were properly sealed, and all the waste properly disposed of, this wouldn’t be happening. The manager here was greedy, he’d cut corners and dumped things he should not have been dumping back into the river. It was also starting to look more an more like the supposedly 'safe' byproduct used to fertilize the gardens and melt the snow was not really safe, and Barret quietly got most of the town to stop using it.
Clayton agreed that Mako mining could be safe, and the two were focused on building a case that would dispose the leadership of the plant for new leadership that would process the Mako in the right way, following the proper proceedures. But they’d need a lot of evidence to move the bureaucratic machinery. Clayton would putting stock in a cousin he said was high on the corporate ladder in Midgar to hear them out.
Barret privately had more doubts. He thought about what he’d do if Shinra’s upper management, even after being confronted with mountains of evidence, still turned a blind eye - after all, profit was profit, and he had no idea how far up the ladder the disregard for the health of North Corel's townsfolk extended. At the very least, all the scientists at this plant had to know what was going on. How could they not? They had access to far more sophisticating testing equipment than Barret did.
That’s why he had to be careful, and collect an undeniable amount of evidence. If they didn’t agree to tighten up the safety here, he’d go straight to the television stations and tell them everything he knew. Shinra would be forced to act then, to avoid a public relations disaster.
The stress meant he had funny dreams, that Max or Marlene - Elenor and Dyne’s unborn child, if it was a boy or a girl - would be born with four eyes, or webbed feet.
But on March 1st she was born on the first floor of the doctor’s office, a perfect and healthy baby girl.
****
Midgar was like nothing Barret had ever seen. As he and Clayton took the glass elevator to the top of Shinra HQ - Dyne, who’d driven with them to Midgar, had refused to so much as set foot above plate - he gazed out in awe at the plate below - extending so far into the distance it still looked endless from forty stories up.
Or perhaps it was the smog? Where the plate ended, a kind of haze blurred the boundary between the ‘steel sky’ and the desert - endless desert - that surrounded the city.
The plate was a marvel of engineering, no doubt about it, but not what he’d envisioned before coming here. He’d thought of a scene from a movie he and Myrna had watched recently, where Midgar would shine and glitter like a paradise on a hill, everything made from steel and glass. Most of the buildings on the plate were made from ordinary materials, cement blocks and vinyl siding. Shinra HQ and a few buildings around it were the only things that looked as futuristic as Barret expected, and even they were slightly dirty from the soot that hung over everything.
Of course, growing up in a coal mining town, Barret was no stranger to dirty, sooty air. The promise of Mako was a promise of the end of that kind of dirtiness, of individually sealed stainless steel barrels stacked in tidy, clean rows for transport in carefully monitored compartments on the train, instead of towers of coal shoveled into open train cars, that trailed a thin stream of black dust into the air as the train pulled away.
Overall, however, the buildings above plate were still fairly clean - much cleaner than North Corel when the coal mines had been active - but in a sanitized way that indicated that the real dirt was still here somewhere - just shoved away, perhaps under the plate, for other people to deal with. None of the houses had back gardens like Myrna's, either - whether because they were suspended on a steel plate fifty meters above the soil, or for some other reason, nothing seemed to grow here.
Barret’s uneasiness grew as the elevator continued to climb - all the floors in the sixties, Clayton explained, belonged to the science department, and the executives met on the conference floors just above.
So many floors dedicated to the scientific study of Mako - how could they not already know?
Barret’s worries came to a sharper point as they stopped briefly at a floor where - according to the sign above the elevator button - the Mayor of Midgar and other city officials had offices.
In North Corel, miners worked for themselves - but of course if everyone had their own plot and mined it their own way, it would not be efficient, and economically it wouldn’t work. Still, the mining rights to the coal in the mountains were collectively held by everyone in the village, and everyone in the village had a voice concerning those rights. That was how the village had been able to cede mining rights to Shinra in the first place.
The Mayor of Midgar residing inside Shinra tower told him that things were organized very differently around here.
Barret shook his head. He thought about Myrna’s quiet strength. He could not give up before he even began. If they didn’t see the problem, he’d have to make them see.
****
“...And here’s the bones of the animals. They’ve doubled in size, some of 'em. The deer that go down to drink at the river have a horn, here, that they never had before. They act aggressive all the time, which they never did before, and charge anyone who comes close. I have a video to play for you all next, to show it."
Fumbling for the remote, he wheeled the big TV on its rolling cart around, and pressed play. The video started with a farmer joking around about mutant vegetables, and ended with a terrified scream as the mutant deer lunged for the camera, like something out of a horror movie. No one human could watch it without feeling anything.
But as Barret looked around at the faces of the suited executives - mostly men - he didn’t see any looks of shock or surprise, merely a few frowns. Some executives in the room wouldn’t meet his gaze at all, busy writing notes for underlings. He met the eyes of Clayton in the back of the room. Clayon looked back sympathetically, and nodded, giving Barret the strength to go on. At least he had an ally here.
Barret summarized at the end of the video, “The Mako refinery at North Corel ought to be shut down, until you guys can make it safe enough to open again.”
Dead silence greeted Barret as he finished his presentation. Barret felt his sense of dread and unease mounting.
He’d been unsure about ending with the deer - to him, what was happening to the children and the old people was more important. But Myrna had convinced him that these city folk, not knowing the kids in North Corel, would relate more to stories about animals. And the video of the crazed deer was a trump card - a horror movie.
Did these people not have hearts? Did their hearts pump something besides blood?
Barret looked toward Clayton again, wanting reassurance. Clayton nodded at him sympathetically and mouthed something, and Barret felt encouraged.
Then Clayton turned his head to answer a question over his earpiece, and left the room, and Barret felt his stomach drop.
Left alone in front of the hostile audience, months of work - his and Myrna’s and Elenor’s - spread out on the table in front of him... and not a single executive had a single question about anything he’d said. They only wanted to know one thing -
“Who else knows about this?”
***
Barret hurried from the room, jabbing a finger at the buttons on the elevator. When it stopped unexpectedly on the fortieth floor, he bailed for the emergency stairs, taking them down three at a time. Which was an excellent thing, because once he reached the ground floor he saw Shinra employees, in wrinkled blue suits like Clayon’s, talking to each other on the radio - waiting for him to come down the elevator or main staircase.
Legs pumping, he ran across the floor, and out of the service exit before any of them could stop him. He made for the train station, and didn't wait for the train - just hurried on foot down the tracks, around the spiraling tunnels to the station below plate, where he hoped to avoid any more men in blue suits.
Making his way to their agreed-upon backup meeting place, he dragged Dyne out of the casino in Wall Market he’d been holed up in.
“Come on,” Barret said grimly.
“What about…”
“I had to leave it all on the table,” Barret said. “....don’t you dare say it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dyne said. “But I told you-”
“Don’t say it!”
***
They lost time looking for a car rental place that didn't ask for ID.
Shinra's revenge against the town, which started before he and Dyne had even returned, was supposedly retaliation for an explosion at one of the reboilers. That explosion took out one of the spokes connecting the tower and ring offices, but miraculously had no casualties.
The same couldn't be said for the soldiers' attack on North Corel. As long as Barret lived he'd never forget the heat, the flames.
He’d gone to his own house first, to find the roof already caved in, and the whole house on fire, with no sign of Myrna.
Then he’d gone to Eleanor and Dyne’s house - and where was Dyne? It was hard to make out anything in the thick black smoke - to find Eleanor and Myrna together, dead under the rubble, the only sound the whoosh of the flames - and, faintly, the sound of a baby crying in the back room.
In the middle of all the confusion, Barret was too numb even to mourn - that would come later.
Digging his way through the burning rubble to the baby’s room, he suffered from severe burns on both arms. He reached her just as the ceiling collapsed - and got a nasty bruise on his back from standing over the cradle, protecting the baby.
Later, Shinra would claim that the fire had been an accident - started by the townsfolk in North Corel in response to the soldiers' presence. But an accidental fire wouldn't have targeted everyone that Barret had known and cared about.
That Marlene, alone, had survived was a miracle - or maybe an act of charity by a sickened Shinra soldier, who couldn’t bring himself to kill the baby too.
With Marlene safe in his arms, he stumbled outside and made his way through the burning town to the river, wondering why he’d been allowed to leave the Shinra conference room at all.
But he got his answer as soon as he’d found a safe place for Marlene with a washerwoman, and returned to town to look for more survivors. As he reached the main street, an entire platoon of soldiers rounded on him and opened fire., clearly under orders to shoot him on sight. Probably they wanted the people in North Corel to witness his execution, see his body after he was killed for daring to challenge them.
Roaring, Barret charged straight for the platoon - which they had not expected. In the confusion, he grabbed the rifle of one soldier and spun it in a wide circle, taking down three. Other soldiers moved in. So be it. He’d brought this to North Corel - not just the Mako plant, which was slowly poisoning the air and the river and the soil they all relied on, but this specific retaliation. He’d been a fool to trust a Shinra lackey.
Someone in that vast tower must have worked out long ago that it would be cheaper to send a spy to work with any would be do-gooders, than to actually fix the problems associated with mining Mako here (if they could be fixed at all).
He was responsible for all of this, and he’d take them all down with him.
But no - to hell with that!!!!!!
Shinra was responsible for all of this, and Shinra had to pay. He got ready to make his final charge, and take as many of them out as he could.
But then he remembered - Marlene.
Barret couldn’t die here, not while she was still alive. He hesitated, and two soldiers used the chance to take him down.
At that moment someone - a local or a soldier? - set fire to a nearby truck. As the engine went up with a bang, it distracted the two soldiers pinning Barret down, and he tossed them both aside and stood up, roaring in pain and fury. Another solider took a swing at him with a firefighter's axe, and got his right arm. Barret hissed, but in the adrenaline of the fight he hardly felt the blow even as it dug until his muscles, almost severing the arm. He spun away from the blow and ran past the remaining soldiers, through the burning town and back to the river, trailing blood behind him. Only the confusion of the smoke and fire, and an attack on the soldiers by some of the townfolk - boys with sticks, children - saved him.
Then, with Marlene cradled in his left arm - the good arm - he disappeared into the mine shafts. Only a local would be able to catch up to him down there.
He’d cross the mountains, circle around, buy passage on a ship - sneak aboard if he had to - and make his way back to Midgar.
He couldn't die here - he had to live.
He had to live for Marlene, but also for revenge.
If Shinra was going to twist the truth, and frame the people who raised the alarm against them as saboteurs, well.
He might as well actually sabotage them next time.